Anti-APT product test sample “BAB0” is shared for security experts

As we promised in our previous blog post, we release BAB0, the test sample that bypassed all 5 anti-APT products that we tested earlier in this year.

BAB0 is written in C++, and it has a server side written in PHP. BAB0 is downloaded by the victim as part of an HTML page, where it is actually hidden in an image with steganography. The downloaded page also contains scripts that extract an executable from the image when the user clicks on something that appears to be a download button. The image has already been uploaded to Virus Total with 0/54 hits. Once BAB0 is running, it can communicate with a remote C&C server. To hide the C&C network traffic, BAB0 simulates a user clicking on links in a web forum, and downloads full HTML pages with CSS style sheets and images. The real C&C traffic is hidden inside these HTTP requests and responses. BAB0 allows for file download to the victim and file upload to the server, as well as remote execution of commands on the infected computer.

We release the BAB0 sample because we believe this is the most effective way of pushing the vendors to address this and similar threats in future releases of their products and to raise awareness about the fact there are no silver-bullet products that protect against everything possible. The sample that we are releasing now consists of the PNG image that contains the BAB0 executable and the scripts that extract BAB0 from the image. We do not release the source code of BAB0, neither we release the server side of the sample. The sample tries to connect to our server, but no real attacking functionality is deployed on it. In order not to harm end-users, we shared the information being released now with anti-APT vendors (not just the ones that we have tested) almost three weeks ago, when we released the report on our test results. We also shared the BAB0 sample with other security companies who expressed their interest after reading our report. So vendors and security companies had sufficient time to prepare for the public release of BAB0 and protect their customers.

Download BAB0 sample
Disclaimer: This sample is not a malware, but it is a possibly unwanted program. Its functionality is similar to those found in real threats. If you run our sample, it will start communicating with our server, but our server does not send any command to the particular sample program and we do not conduct anything harmfuly for anybody who runs this sample. This sample is designed for security experts to be run in sandbox environment or to analyze its capabilities. We do not prohibit reverse engineering of the sample, and we give explicit permission to run it by security professionals. However, intellectual propery rights on the software and the incorporated ideas belong to CrySyS Lab, part of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The sample is provided in an AS-IS basis, as it is disclosed for free, we do not give any warranty, we do not guarantee it cannot cause harm in any IT system. This is a prototype work. If you are not confident how to work with it, please do not download. Authors and the institution take no responsibility on any damages related to the sample or any derivative work.
According to our understanding, this demonstrative work does not contain any exploit, it is not a weapon and not considered as dual-use product according to Hungarian and EU laws. If you have questions or problems, please contact us.

PS. Easter egg:
Babo means hobbit in Hungarian, and we named our sample so, because it was designed to stealthily bypass all state-of-the-art defenses, while actually being very simple, and this is similar to the way Frodo, the hobbit, managed to bypass all defenses of the fearsome Sauron in the Lord of the Rings.